Is there something deeper driving the ‘fleg protests’, the road blocks,
forlorn handfuls shivering along white lines, the traipsing in and out
to Belfast City Hall?

Now that it’s over - and it was as soon as Matt Baggott abandoned his
misconceived inept response - it’s time to try to make some sense of the
three months.

Of course the violence and chaos of those months whetted the appetite
for rioting such as occurred in Glengormley and at the weekend in
Shaftesbury Square/Sandy Row, but it’s of a different nature from the
nightly manifestations from December.

First, those so-called ‘fleg protests’ were pretty well confined to the
greater Belfast area. Yes, there were guest appearances around places
like Derry, Dungannon, Armagh and Ballymena, but they were
flash-in-the-pan, copycat efforts.

Secondly, we know that the worst violence was orchestrated by the UVF
with its leading front men lamenting the poverty of loyalist districts.
No-one in unionism pointed out that the poverty in most cases is caused
by the UVF men themselves whose intimidation and protection rackets have
driven business out of those very districts. The irony of UVF gangsters
masquerading as community leaders over the past three years meeting the
DUP leader in a #20 million community centre to whine ‘we get nathin’ is
not lost on the public.

All this we know, but it doesn’t explain the three months of pathetic,
bedraggled frozen specimens trailing around the streets wrapped in flags
and later displaying their illiteracy on Facebook and Twitter.

Was it a coincidence it all began shortly after the belated release of
the 2011 census figures in November? Figures which confirmed for even
the dimmest unionist that the game is up. No, not that there’s going to
be a united Ireland in 2016, but worse, much, much worse, that the
Fenians are taking over Norn Irn, that the tragi-comic slogan of Norn
Irn’s football fans, ‘our wee country.co.uk’ no longer applies.

Horror of horrors, it’s not just Fenians at large, it’s Sinn Fein taking
over the north and the vote to bring the flag flying in Belfast into
line with elsewhere exemplified the change in the terms of trade in the
city and the north as a whole. That’s why there wasn’t the same impetus
behind protests in places like Ballymena. They haven’t spotted the
change. Elsewhere, like Dungannon, it happened years ago.

Truly the coat-trailing in and out of the now nationalist city, what
unionists like to call the ‘capital of Northern Ireland’ (cos it’s a wee
country you see) showed a lost tribe on the retreat.

The aimless, pointless, leaderless protests, followed by a return walk
to where they came from was like nothing so much as the native American
trail of tears in the 1830s - a walk into history.

Sadly just as tragi-comic was the performance of unionist political
leaders, themselves just as inarticulate as the flag wavers. It was no
use nationalists calling for leadership from these men. The unionist
political leaders share the same sentiments as the flag wavers and are
just as much at a loss to know what to do about unionists becoming a
minority. Hence the stupidly inept unionist forum. Remember that?

They’re prepared to do anything except admit the facts of reduced status
and the need to manage a future of decline, to tell their voters that
the social and economic bases for establishing the north as a unionist
entity no longer exist.

Now that the demographic coin has flipped, or perhaps more accurately
the penny has finally dropped, were the street protests of December to
March an indication that now, paradoxically, unionists have become the
problem in the north, the place the British invented for them, rather
than the nationalists who objected to the invention?

Is the dilemma now to find the means to cope with a disaffected unionist
minority who see Catholics a majority in every level of education and
taking over the professions?

Were the protests an expression of shock and disbelief that Belfast
really has a nationalist majority?

Is the drive for so-called ‘unionist unity’ a political manifestation of
the same problem? A forlorn attempt to stem the tide, to pretend for
another few years?

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